Former Blairite Cabinet minister Patricia Hewitt said civil rights campaign
group which she used to run would be prepared to offer legal advice to
adults who wanted to have sex with 14-year-olds, new documents show

Miss Hewitt was the general secretary of the NCCL – which today is known as human rights group Liberty - from 1974 to 1983

Former Blairite Cabinet minister Patricia Hewitt said that a civil rights campaign group which she used to run would be prepared to offer legal advice to adults who wanted to have sex with 14 years olds.

A memorandum unearthed from the archives of the National Council for Civil Liberties show shows that Miss Hewitt told a committee of campaigners – including a man later convicted as a sex offender - that a legal department headed by Harriet Harman would look at cases of sex between adults and children aged 14 to 16.

Miss Hewitt was the general secretary of the NCCL – which today is known as human rights group Liberty - from 1974 to 1983 while Miss Harman was its legal officer from 1978 to 1982.

In a memorandum discussing the NCCL’s approach to paedophilia, read to staff and members of the NCCL’s gay rights sub-committee on September 12, 1978, she said: “Where we are approached about a case where the relationship involves partners over the age of 14 (ie which would be lawful within our proposed reform of the law), it may be appropriate for the legal department to become involved or, if the relationship is homosexual, the gay rights committee.

“This does not mean that all such cases can be taken by NCCL: the decision to take up a case of this kind should be taken in the same way as for other legal department or gay rights cases.”

Memo on paedophilia from Patricia Hewitt, read out on September 12, 1978 at a gay rights committee meeting

The 14-strong sub-committee contained Tom O’Carroll, the chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange who was later convicted of child porn offences, and Nettie Pollard, a NCCL employee, who Miss Harman said this week appeared to have “promoted paedophilia”.

The news came as Nick Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister, suggested Miss Harman should apologise for the links between PIE and the NCCL.

Former Labour chairman Tom Watson MP added that if he had been at the NCCL and was faced with dealing with PIE “I wouldn’t have touched it with a bargepole”.

Separately, O’Carroll told the BBC that Miss Harman did not want to “rock the boat” over links with a prominent child sex group for the sake of her career.

He said: “Harman and Patricia Hewitt couldn’t just kick out PIE - well, they could, I suppose, try, but they didn’t even try.

“And the reason they didn’t try is that they didn’t want to rock the boat because their careers within NCCL depended on them not rocking the boat too much.”

Miss Harman has repeatedly claimed that attempts by PIE had been “pushed at the to the margins” at the NCCL by 1976, well before she joined in 1978.

She said: “PIE were a loathsome organisation. In 1976 the NCCL took them on and pushed them to the margins.

“I have never even met Tom O’Carroll, I never did any work with what was called the gay rights committee at that time, which he sat on, and he had no influence over my work.

“They were a loathsome organisation but they had nothing to do with my work and as far as Tom O’Carroll, a man I have never met and who was subsequently convicted for paedophilia, commenting on what my views as about my career, I hope you will take it from me, not from him.”

The Telegraph submitted detailed questions to Miss Hewitt, a former trade and industry secretary in Tony Blair’s Government, but she had not responded at the time of going to press.